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ABOUT THE STORE : STORE HISTORY

Store History

Borderlands first opened its doors on Monday, November 3, 1997, at 534 Laguna Street (in San Francisco's Hayes Valley neighborhood). The space was about 1000 square feet in a pre-fire Victorian building. In the past the space had been an office, an ice cream store, and was originally the servants' quarters for the building next door. The character of the building helped shape the aesthetic of the store, a style that owner Alan Beatts calls "Minimalist Victorian". During the course of getting ready to open, Alan learned how to build bookshelves, refinish wood floors, and more about plumbing than he ever wanted to know. Borderlands began as a used-only bookstore, the shelves stocked with about 6,000 books (a combination of Alan's personal collection and some great collectibles and paperbacks purchased from the legendary, but now sadly defunct used bookstore, Know Knew Books in Palo Alto.) The store rapidly became a meeting place and social center for readers and authors, and hosted many special events. The earliest events at Borderlands were readings with authors Peter Beagle and John Shirley.

In the Spring of 1998, the store began stocking new hardcovers, with a special focus on independent publishers. To this day Borderlands has one of the best selections of small-press genre titles in the country. Near the end of that year the store began carrying selected new softcover titles. In February of 1999, Alan hired Borderlands' first employee, Jeremy Lassen, who still works at the store every week despite his other job as an editor for Night Shade Books.

In 1999, Borderlands earned the honor of Best Creepy Movie Night in Hayes Valley from the SF Weekly newspaper, and the Best Place to Meet a Kinky Space Cadet from the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2000. On the heels of both of these awards, Alan was repeatedly reminded by his friends and staff that "there's no such thing as bad publicity."

In March of 2001, the management learned of an opportunity to move the store to a much larger space in the Mission District. Since the Mission was where Alan had wanted to open originally and the store was starting to get a bit short on space, this seemed like a golden opportunity. The owner of the used clothing store Captain Jack's on Valencia Street wanted to close his store and move to Los Angeles to become a stand-up comedian. Borderlands took over the lease and bought the inventory from the clothing store and for several months all of the booksellers did double duty -- selling books at Laguna Street and used clothes on Valencia! When all the clothes were gone, they set about transforming the place into Borderlands. Alan built almost all of the bookshelves you'll see in the store photos in our Gallery , and he and the staff put in countless hours refinishing the floors, repainting the livid pink and green walls to the current, more subdued antique white, building additional walls, removing large piles of moldering jeans and other debris from the basement, and otherwise becoming temporary handy people to make Borderlands look the best it possibly could.

On Tuesday, May 8, 2001, Borderlands opened in its current 2000 square foot space at 866 Valencia Street. Shortly thereafter the store received an award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian for being The Best Sign of De-Gentrification in the Mission.

In December of 2009, after too many months of preparation and construction, Borderlands Cafe opened in the same building, in the space next door to the bookstore. The space had recently become vacant after its previous long term tenant, an upholstery and furniture repair company, moved to the East Bay.  Once again, the build-out for the cafe involved much construction, carpentry, plumbing, and the safe and reverent dismantling of a Santería alter in the basement, where the previous tenants had apparently conducted regular religious ceremonies.  During this build-out and reconstruction of the space, many interesting details about the history of the building were discovered, some of which have been shared at the cafe web site.

In January of 2012, the large archway between the cafe space and the bookstore space was uncovered, allowing Borderlands to conduct events in the cafe space, which in turn allowed the store to accommodate nearly twice as many people for any given event. This change allowed us to have many memorable signings of enormous size -- Currently Patrick Rothfuss, John Scalzi, and Brandon Sanderson are swapping spots on Borderlands' "largest in-store event" leader board.

One result of this archway was that our beloved store cat could no longer make her home in the bookstore -- the health department frowns upon animals in restaurants, and there is really no humane way to keep the cat from wandering into the cafe space.  She now lives at home with the manager, but occasionally comes by the store for a visit.

The store has been mentioned by AAA's travel magazine VIA, Gourmet Magazine, and the Washington Post. Borderlands currently stocks nearly 30,000 titles. The store continues to expand and today is regarded as one of the premier genre bookstores in the country.

About Borderlands' Name

There were many reasons for calling the store Borderlands; partially a tribute to the brilliant and eponymous anthologies of that name, partially a nod to Terri Windling's Bordertown books, partially a reference to William Hope Hodgson's classic House on the Borderland, but mostly because science fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror exist on the borderlands of literature.

"Myths are one of our most useful techniques of living, ways of telling the world and narrating reality, but in order to be useful they must (however archetypal and collectively human their structure) be retold; and the teller makes them over -- and over." - Ursula K. Le Guin, from Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

"Myth is the collective language of a people. The stories that we as a society and as individuals tell each other color our world view and shape our responses and judgments. These stories thrive in a hinterland of shadowy explanation, justifying our convictions and creating a safe place to house our deepest fears. Fantasy literature exists at this same (mostly unexplored) periphery of imagination and fundamental truths; the borderland from which our deepest certainties occasionally emerge. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing is the new mythology." - Jude Feldman, Borderlands' General Manager

About Borderlands' Logo

Old Sages by the Figure of the Snake
Encircled thus, did oft expression make
Of Annual-Revolutions; and of things,
Which wheele about in everlasting-rings;
There ending, where they first of all begun ...
... These Roundells, help to shew the Mystery
of that immense and blest Eternitie,
From whence the CREATURE sprung, and into whom
It shall again, with full perfection come ...

-- A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London, 1635) by George Wither (the specific reference is to emblem 3.23)

uroboros (n.). Also ouroboros, uroborus. The symbol, usually in the form of a circle, of a snake (or dragon) eating its tail.

-- The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition

The Ouroboros (alternate spellings include oroborus, uroboros, and oureboros) as an image dates as far back as 1600 BC, where it appears in Egypt. The name comes from the Greek and means, literally, "biting its own tail". It also appears in Norse mythology as Jörmungandr, otherwise known as the Midgard Serpent which encircles the world and will wake for the final battle between good and evil ( Ragnarök). The Greeks interpreted it as symbolizing the cyclic principle of the universe and that which has no end and no beginning.

We chose the ouroboros as the logo for Borderlands because of the relation it has to used bookselling (which was where we got our start). Though a used book has a beginning and (if we're unlucky) an end, there is a very cyclic nature to the business. Any number of times we have resold the same book over and over as one customer buys it, later sells it back to us, and then we sell it again.

Plus, to be honest, it looks pretty neat.

Staff Biographies